Friend Rhee's wedding!

We did the kitchen cleanup last Friday...it took maybe an hour or two, a refreshing change from the grueling (but very fun and educational!) four-hour class.
We get one week off before the next quarter starts. In the meantime, I have a personal project going on...my friend Rhee's wedding! She's having a very small wedding, and was thinking about baking the desserts herself...but decided to just pay me, a pastry chef-in-training, to bake the desserts instead--I was flattered when she said that she's confident they will taste better if I make them :)
Her wedding theme is...Alice in Wonderland (the Disney version); lot of whimsical, colorful characters, which would allow me to play with a lot of ideas! The first thing I came up with was the "EAT ME" cookie.

Remember those scenes where Alice grabs a cookie (in the book, it was a cake instead of a cookie) that says, "EAT ME"? The Disney animators did a pretty good job of making those cookies look tasty. I browsed through the web looking for shots of those pastries. Found a few...

(Copyright of Disney, for entertainment purposes only. Please don't use for commercial or for- profit in any way!!!!!!!!!)

I figured the easiest way to do this would be the sugar cookies. They can be cut into any shapes and decorated in any way. The shots from the movie showed some star-shapes, frill-edge, rounds, and maybe a heart?

So I set about baking sugar cookies. At first, I used the recipe in the school textbook. I thought about using the one we did in class--which is different from the textbook version. But since we already did the recipe provided by the Instructor (which, incidentally, produced a sad product...check out the Intro to Pastry Recap Week 3) I wanted to try the textbook. Well...

(Sorry, no pics) The dough spread. A lot. So much that the shapes were (almost) beyond recognition. I did a quick fix--just re-cut the shapes out from the baked cookies, which actually worked pretty well. I ended up with crispy, yet chewy decent-looking sugar cookies--with rough, jutting edges, lacking the rounded, smooth edges characteristic for these cookies.

Hmmm....they tasted OK, but nothing spectacular. But I still had time to experiment with different recipes, so I just decorated them for sampling.

I really like the Cheshire Cat one.

Next, I wanted to make cookies that look like playing cards (if the theme was Through the Looking Glass, I would've made chess pieces...) To do this, I made the dough for Black & White cookies, a type of icebox cookies. Once chilled, they can be cut into any shapes, rearranged, and baked to make stripes, checkerboards, etc. I used a small fondant-cutter to cut out a heart shape from the center of a rectangular piece, one from vanilla, the other from chocolate dough, and switched the pieces...

...and baked them. Again, these spread a bit, so I had to cut the edges to create that sharp, straight edges...then dipped them in chocolate to hide them. Besides, no one EVER complains about a little extra chocolate.

Next, I thought about the game of croquet that Alice had to play, using flamingoes and hedgehogs. Then I had a brilliant idea--if cream puff swans exist, then why not cream puff flamingoes?? As for the hedgehogs, I got the idea from a chocolate cake shaped like a hedgehog from a local bakery--how about hedgehog truffles?

I used a recipe for buckeyes for these cuties. Buckeyes are basically truffle-like candy, with creamy melt-in-your-mouth peanutbutter filling coated with chocolate. Here, I shaped the balls of peanutbutter so they're pointed on one end. Then I stuck a few shards of crisp wafers for the spikes, and let them freeze overnight. The next day, I dipped them in melted chocolate, and used toothpicks to dot the eyes and the nose. They turned out very cute...and delicious, too. Even my Mom who's not a big fan of really sweet candies, like them.
Then the flamingoes.... I've been baking choux pastry since high school, so I was able to whip those up no problem. I added a few drops of red food coloring for the pink, and piped out the flamingo heads.
For the assembly, I cut the top third of the puff, and cut the top in half. After piping whipped cream (OK, Cool Whip dessert topping...) into the shells, I stuck the top part into the cream for the wings and then the heads.

Cute! Maybe I'll dip the 'beaks' of the flamingoes for a more realistic look.
Rhee squealed in delight when I showed her the samples; she loved them! Right away, she ordered...uh...5 dozen Playing Card Cookies, 5 dozen 'EAT ME' and Cheshire Cat cookies, a dozen hedgehog truffles, and a dozen flamingo puffs... It's going to be a looooong weekend...

Every time Alice eats or drinks something, her body either grows or shriks. Which makes one wonder if Nintendo stole this idea of eating mushrooms that cause sudden growth spurts and incorporated it into Super Mario...